Last Sunday, Pastor Albert preached about “Vision Sunday!” A vision where church is a party. Where church is fun!

But what exactly is a fun church?

And how does one make a church fun?

Big questions. I don’t have the answers. But I googled it. And found some interesting stuff.

Fun & Games

Here’s something interesting: people don’t often know how to describe what’s fun for them.

So it is often pointless to ask. And sometimes worse than pointless, because you might end up giving them something they say they want. When they don’t actually want that at all. [1]

An example:

Gamers say they like “good graphics,” so video game companies make games with amazing graphics. Yet alotta of the titles in GAMESTOP’s clearance bin have some of the most amazing graphics on the planet, but are not at all fun. Meanwhile, you have a game with decidedly lousy graphics (I recently heard of this thing called the Minecraft) that is like the funnest thing since 12-sided die and a level-6 irresistible dance spell.

And what about church? If we did a survey for church asking people what would make church more fun, my guess is we’d get a list like this [2]:

More trendier music

Funnier sermons

More comfortable pews

Name brand coffee

Cheerleaders

Or something like that.

But, as marketing guru Guy Kawaski says, don’t ask people what they want; just watch what they do. Which is exactly what gaming-&-fun guru (a lot gurus in this post) Nicole Lazzaro has done.

Nicole Lazzaro

Her idea of fun comes in four packages:

People Fun (Friendship): People love hanging out with their friends. It’s bonding and addictive.

Hard Fun (Challenge): People love a challenge, something that is hard enough to make us feel accomplished but not so hard that we get lost or frustrated.

Easy Fun (Novelty): People love to explore and imagine without feeling like they’re on time or performance constraints.

Serious Fun (Meaning): People love to be inspired. Inspired to think, feel and act in ways that will change their worlds.

Lazzaro’s research shows that any one of these experiences = a fun time. And three-outta-four in one experience? Well then you got a best-seller. [3]

How does our church stack up? I’m not gonna answer that. But I bet you’re mentally doing a little assessment right now.

So, let’s ask ourselves again: how does one make a church fun?

The Theology of Fun

And now to my plagiarized blog-post-title: “The Theology of Fun” is a blog series by Heather Zempel of National Community Church in DC. Heather, by all appearances, is a warm and fun-loving human being.

Throw Better Parties: “Hospitality is more than teacups, doilies, well set tables, and good manners. It’s a lot more dangerous than that. And a lot more fun.”

The Discipline of Fun: Yes, spontaneous is fun. But most of the time, someone in the background minding the details goes a long way towards a good time.

Take God Seriously… Not Yourself: Sometimes dancing naked in the streets is exactly the kind of foolish humility that God wants from us. Seriously. Look it up. 2 Samuel 6.

Why Fun?: What is humanity’s purpose but to glorify God and enjoy him forever? (C.S. Lewis)

Festivus

Back to Albert’s sermon:

The Gospel of Luke talks about a big party that’s being planned by some important dude. And this big shot wants to invite all his friends. But they’re too busy to come. So, what does he do? He decides to open his doors to the whole rest of the world. This, said Jesus, is what the Kingdom of Heaven is. A place not for the insiders but for the outsiders. Not for people who’ve got something going for them, but for people who aint’ got nothing going for them.

It’s a party full of human beings. Just plain human beings. Gimpy, limpy, pimply, busted-up and sickly. Simply.

This is the party. Not a place to show off how rich and important we are, or how blissfully married we are, or how funny or successful or intelligent we are. But a place where the qualification is how human we are.

It’s like a Festivus for the Restavus.

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NOTES

[1] Guy Kawasaki describes a market research experiment for a boombox company. They asked a bunch of teenagers what color boombox they liked: Screaming Yellow of Basic Black. All of them said Yellow. At the end, they gave each kid a free boombox. They could pick Yellow or Black. They all took the Black one.

[2] This list is BS. I didn’t do a survey. I just made up some generic things that some imaginary generic church goers would say.

[3] Nicole’s company, XEODesign, does research on why people play games in order to develop methods to increase gaming engagement. In 2004, they used state of the art facial expression analysis to formulate their “The 4 Keys to Fun” theory, “a model that demystifies how best sellers create captivating play, rich experiences, and strong player re-engagement.”

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Juan Zung is a secular Christian, practicing Christianity but remaining atheistic in his beliefs. If this seems completely contradictory, welcome to his world! He writes freelance copy “for a living” and he blogs at Ghozt Writer. His posts on Christianity are found HERE.

My previous post was 100% supported by study of Nicole Lazzaro and now it’s time to know her opinion. It’s very stressful! From one hand, I’m very excited to hear her opinion however, in the same time, I’m scared that her feedback could destroy my dream!

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Sun, 22 Apr 2012 13:32:07 +0000Fliphttps://tiltworld.wordpress.com/2012/04/22/video-game-character-throws-down-an-earth-day-challenge-dares-ceo-to-plant-1-million-trees-to-slow-climate-change-5-2/In celebration of Earth Day Flip, the determined tadpole on a mission to reforest Shady Glen throws down and Earth Day Challenge and dares Nicole Lazzaro, CEO of XEOPlay to plant 1 million trees in Madagascar. Flip plans to send Nicole packing to Madagascar to plant the first 1,000 trees once players earn 3 Million Tilt Points.

In celebration of Earth Day player points are worth double the Tilt Points! That means we get to our first 1,000 trees planted twice as fast!

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Sat, 05 Jun 2010 08:25:15 +0000Kelly Ruedhttps://kellyrued.com/2010/06/05/nicole-lazzaro-a-useful-theory-of-fun/Just watched an interesting video of Nicole Lazzaro speaking about her excellent research and insights into how game players experience emotions (her most cited work identifies and explains the multitude of human emotions that most people just lump together as “fun”).

Why Lazzaro’s Theory of Fun Is Useful

Lazzaro’s work is comprehensive and she thinks outside the box of the mainstream video game industry.

Her insight goes far beyond just making a game fun for the sake of fun. Unlike design professionals in every other industry, such as architects and productivity software designers, game designers sometimes resent having to design games that produce other measurable, quantifiable outcomes besides fun. Creating a functional building, working within end-user specifications and other design constraints is essentially what an architect is paid and expected to do but there are obviously major perks for architects that also create enjoyable, livable, beautiful spaces too. The aesthetic component is there, as with website design, but the practical constraints really define the design challenge. It’s the same in a marketing game or gameified application trying to achieve outcomes above and beyond a good time for the player.

When the game has to serve a purpose beyond simply being fun to play, I think it’s best to look to designers like Lazzaro for insight rather than to the mainstream video game industry right now. Studying Grand Theft Auto or the intricacies of a good tower defense game WILL NOT help you develop a great social media title that engages your customers with your brand. Studying how and why players experience fun, engagement, and motivation while gaming WILL help you.

Her understanding of fun is rooted in the observable experience of gaming, playing, and engagement. Sure, she looks at mainstream video games, but the important difference for me is that she also looks beyond and synthesizes a lot of other relevant observations. Her theory of fun is not a personal manifesto justifying how one person likes to design games, nor is it a dissection of “best-selling” video games to see which mechanics were popular among the self-selecting group that played those games (the latter is particularly unhelpful for the broader application of game mechanics outside of traditional video games because there have been very few video game hits that sold enough to even be regarded as popular in the realm of popular media like top box office movies, best-selling books, or high-rated television).

Lazzaro Offers Actionable Insights for Experience Design

Lazzaro’s work is honest-to-goodness research and insight on the experience of fun, coupled with actionable insights on how designers can better delight, engage, and motivate people. If I could attend a game design workshop or Q&A with anyone in game design today, I’d probably pick Lazzaro or McGonigal because they 100% get the big picture of play and the myriad of game forms that exist (and will evolve in the future).

One specific, actionable idea is how Lazzaro presents player emotion as a palette of colors the experience designer can use to paint entertainment, engagement and motivation onto a process, product, or interface design. I would love to see an infographic like this for marketing games, to help marketers match verbs, emotions, and desired outcomes with types of play we can engender with game mechanics.

I particularly like her holistic look at fun (acknowledging the important role of frustration and other prerequisite distressing emotions that also contribute to engaging entertainment experiences, such as the fear of a terrifying horror game or the bittersweet sadness when we lose or a character we like is harmed). Lazzaro’s work seems to be as close as we currently have to a “universal theory of fun” for practical applications.

Other Game Design Theories Don’t Gel with Play as Work

If you’re looking at play as work, you’re not talking about gaming as an art form anymore. Unless you think going to work every day is a form of performance art, I think the kind of gaming we are seeing with Foursquare, frequent flyer programs, and blackjack are more about real world pay offs and entertainment more than they are about art. Some games are definitely, unquestionably, art. However, just as some written works are art, there are many other types of writing that do not function in an artistic context at all.

A lot of the big-name guys in game design seems to focus more on specific types of fun, such as learning and mastery (hard fun, fiero) without a balanced look at all the other ways people like to play. There is even a persistent effort to conceptually separate “real games” from software toys or other kinds of game-rule constrained or mediated play. And the result is often game design discussions focused on the types of complex nuanced game systems that most people don’t enjoy playing (casinos have more slot machines than blackjack tables for a reason). One of the narrower definitions of gaming ever bandied about as gospel is this one by Greg Costikyan:

A game is a form of art in which participants, termed players, make decisions in order to manage resources through game tokens in the pursuit of a goal.

That’s a good definition for some types of games, but it isn’t comprehensive enough to be accurate (what’s the goal in Nintendogs? what are the game tokens in a game of tag? how is rock, paper, scissors artwork?) and it completely misses the point of why we play or why games are enjoyable.

Dungeons & Dragons is clearly a game with players making decisions to manage resources through game tokens in pursuit of game-designer defined goals (mainly to “level up” and develop the characters), but everything that makes the game fun and engaging (including the primary goals pursued) comes from outside the base rule system of the game. The player goals (including the goals of the DM, who is essentially a player of the D&D game system too) and actual gameplay in D&D more closely resembles an hour with a sandbox game like The Sims than a round of Chess which has a definitive, predefined static goal for every player.

Even the rule systems of D&D themselves are collaboratively created by the game designers and the players (particularly the DM player) to create house rules and unique interpretations of how complex rules interact. What Lazzaro calls “easy fun” abounds in a game of D&D, but many game designers would focus only on the “hard fun” parts of the game design: the rule book, the reference tables, and the quantifiable stat (points, levels) and badge (items, gear, story hooks) rewards (and a bit on the setting and aesthetic window-dressing) rather than the more salient components of the game that actually make it fun for the DM and the other players. The social fun, and the curiosity of what will happen next is at least as important as the combat resolution rule system. Hell, the biggest part of what has made D&D a successful game is that it provides a great opportunity for the DM player to tell a story and explore their game design skills with willing players in a social setting (a combination of social fun and serious fun). The designers of D&D weren’t experts in player emotion though they sure developed an enduring and influential game franchise.

Like most successful games of the past, D&D designers were simply committed to play testing until they found the right game rules to make the experience fun. This made game development a bit risky, like trying to write a best-selling novel and reiterate on reviewer feedback before you published. You could do your best, but the market ultimately decided if your game was fun. For people who are in the business of providing value besides fun, the risk and expense of trying to develop a fun game using trial and error alone is not the most attractive proposition (hence we see a lot of me-too, copy-cat game design in marketing games because a familiar game design that is well-liked already may reduce the risk of market rejection).

Marketing games and play-as-work projects need to have a much more robust understanding at the outset of what specific kinds of fun they are targeting. It’s not enough to just target “fun” when fun obviously has so many different facets and experiential qualities. Your new Android app might live or die by its ability to get fun right on its first release (how many people reinstall a rejected app to see if it “got better in the next version”?). In fact, your product’s particular flavor of fun will limit the market it attracts and retains. You might create a game that IS fun… for 40% of your customers. Not an epic fail, but how do you go about making it more fun? How do you know what types of fun you are not delivering without a much more detailed vocabulary about the component emotions of fun?

Lazzaro’s Theory of Fun Is about Outcomes

That’s why Lazarro’s theory of fun, focused on experiential emotion rather than the game mechanics themselves, is extremely useful when you’re trying to make games that provide real world outcomes and value above and beyond fun.

In all fields of design, a focus on the outcomes you want, not the tools or design philosophy you like to use, will lead to better designs. And in experience design, user emotion targeting is really more important than creating a “good” game by traditional game design standards. Foursquare is not going to win any game design awards, but damn if they aren’t successful in their niche right now.

Do you think about the full spectrum of fun when you design user experiences? Do you spend as much time thinking about player emotions as you spend on the game mechanic and rule design? Leave a Comment